Now and then I've advocated for adding a 6th person to the standard group. This would free up more space for DPS. But then a gnome got me thinking. No, not about trajectories and "can I punt her past that?" Instead, about those rare-these-days sub-5 groups in which people actually try and struggle and fight and play. They know there are better ways to get rewards, so it's all about the experience, and I don't mean the experience that makes our characters ding, but perhaps that makes us players ding, as we level up our patience and tactics. I've run into this myself, and also enjoyed it.

Maybe this can become normal.

What if Blizzard dropped groups down to 4 people? It would hurt the DPS, but let's remember: DPS hate us, by us I mean tanks and healers. Why else would they play the way they do? Never attribute to incompetence that which can be adequately explained by malice. But that's beside the point.

With one less DPS, even with the tank being one of those who matches the DPS, that's still a 25% loss overall. That's going to make it trickier to just AoE everything down or burn through mechanics such as needing to kite or switch targets or whatever else. We'd each have to play a bit smarter.

It would be slower. Is that really so bad? I hate to think that we've all being running miserable randoms just for emblems. Would it be an improvement to run them slower but actually enjoy them?

Instances would still be tuned for bad 5-man groups, so the change wouldn't just be "one less person, easier instance".

I don't think that's enough of a positive, nor do I think radically changing the dynamics of grouping is healthy.

People generally hate change. If Blizzard did this no one will cheer. People will however say fuck this and leave as dps queue time goes from 30 minutes to 90 minutes.

Next why don't you simply do this, regardless of Blizzard? Just make a pet project of 4 manning every level 80 Heroic. It would be quite interesting to do and nothing in the WoW ruleset is stopping you.

In all honesty, I do think the negatives outweigh the positives, but I like considering ideas anyway, to see if there's anything good to take from them.

An undermanned project would require me to switch to an alt, since frankly my main is so overgeared that even with 3 people heroics would be trivial. I might try it on my moonkin; he recently hit 80 and is still in quite a few greens.